A View of OSC's Cygnus Unmanned Spacecraft

With the American space shuttles scheduled for retirement later this year, the burden of ensuring that the United States is still capable of delivering astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) will fall in private hands. There are several companies in the game, but by far the most successful are likely to be Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Inc. (SpaceX), and Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation. While SpaceX is well on track to launching its Falcon 9 medium-lift rocket within a few months, Orbital will unveil its design in a flight planned for 2011. Here is a look at what engineers are working at over in Virginia.

Both companies are under large contracts with NASA for ensuring that supplies continue to flow to the ISS. While SpaceX has a $1.6-billion contract, Orbital is engaged in a $1.9-billion contract with the American space agency, which states that the company needs to deliver eight payloads to the station overall. While other groups in the spaceflight game are still newbies, and therefore struggling to make a name for themselves, Orbital is different. It was founded in 1982 and currently has no less than 3,500 employees. It has collaborated closely with the US government and has launched countless Pegasus and Minotaur rockets, delivering both civilian and military payloads.

Now, the corporation is working on developing the Cygnus space capsule, an unmanned cargo spacecraft that will be delivered to orbit aboard a brand-new Taurus 2 delivery system. “We're not a small, newly-formed company trying to establish a track record of mission success, but we're also not bureaucratically hidebound. I don't know that you can really find that combination anywhere else in the industry. We let the track record of our products speak for itself,” explains the Orbital Vice President of Corporate Communications, Barron Beneski. According to experts, the large amount of expertise that engineers here have should give this company a definite edge over its competitors.

The Cygnus freighter is separated into two functional areas, the pressurized cargo module and the service module. While the former will be stuck with the actual payload – a maximum of 5,952 pounds, or 2,700 kilograms – the other segment will contain communications, avionic, power, command and control equipment. “The service module is being designed to human safety standards, because it operates in close proximity with the space station before the robotic arm grapple. We are probably the industry expert these days in launch abort systems through our work on Orion, so that know-how and capability resides in Orbital,” Beneski concludes, quoted by Space.